Conventional ferroic transducers employ the ferroic material between a pair of electrodes on opposite sides of the transducer which use the electric field across the thickness of the transducer to convert the acoustic signals into electrical signals and vice versa for underwater or medical sonar use. The term ferroic when used herein includes ferroelectric, pyroelectric and electrostrictive materials. Another application is as a bolometer array for IR imaging using the pyroelectric coefficient of the material. Typically these devices at least in thin film form have low sensitivity. In addition they have high capacitance in the neighborhood of 10-100 pf which is not well matched with present CMOS technology that has input capacitances as low as 0. 1 pf or even less. One attempt to increase sensitivity and decrease capacitance partitions the transducer into many small elements and connects them in series. However, this introduces a number of problems including wasted space, complicated fabrication and increased stray capacitance: the individual elements must be spaced from each other, interlayer connections must be provided and the multitude of individual elements increases stray capacitance.